Key Success Factors for Delivering Application Services
George Feuerlicht, Jiří Voříšek · UTS ePRESS (University of Technology Sydney) · 2003
The business benefits of the ASP (Application Service Provider) model for delivery of enterprise applications are now widely recognized and include cost reduction and predictability, avoiding the need to retain expensive and specialized technical staff, ability to scale-up and scale-down the system according to current requirements, and other cost efficiencies.Increasingly, the ASP model is regarded as a viable alternative to implementing applications in-house, and many organizations are considering outsourcing at least some of their enterprise applications to application service providers.It is now equally clear that the delivery of enterprise applications as a service poses significant business and technical challenges and that these challenges have been largely responsible for the demise of a large number of the original ASPs.More specifically, reliable delivery of application services to a large number of client organizations requires a suitable technical infrastructure that addresses the requirements for customization and integration without creating substantial overheads associated with servicing each client individually.Successful outsourcing of application services is dependent on a number of key factors that include the selection of suitable application services for outsourcing, precise specification of the interface between different components of the internal and external systems, and the ability to integrate outsourced components with components that are operated and managed within the client organization.In this paper we firstly discuss different types of IS/ICT outsourcing and present a framework for outsourcing of IS/ICT services, processes, and resources.We then examine the various outsourcing options including application servicing in the context of this framework, and identify the key success factors for each type of outsourcing scenario.